Belly dancer strangled by ceiling fan

[Casey]

Originally Posted by crocoduck_hunter

They've also had blatantly false deaths, too, like the Tanning Bed Death.

Not quite the same, though. Falling asleep in the tanning bed was part, but another crucial bit was using psorolin ointment as tanning lotion. Psorolin is a treatment for psoriasis, and weakens the skin's resistance to UV. UV insult damages the skin, there's a mass slough, and you get "burns" without burning the skin with heat.

[diddy]

Originally Posted by Alarm

Get the lanterns and pitch forks and let's have us an old fashioned unruly mob!

Lanters are far too modern for my unruly mob. We prefer good ol fashioned torches with fire. That way we can burn them!

(in case it wasn't obvious - I am joking)

[crocoduck_hunter]

Originally Posted by Casey

Not quite the same, though. Falling asleep in the tanning bed was part, but another crucial bit was using psorolin ointment as tanning lotion. Psorolin is a treatment for psoriasis, and weakens the skin's resistance to UV. UV insult damages the skin, there's a mass slough, and you get "burns" without burning the skin with heat.

We must have seen different episodes. What I saw did a straight-up rendition of the myth. There were other episodes that were even worse, like one where a man pretending to be a spy to impress a blind date was assassinated by KGB agents using a high-powered laser weapon hidden in a suitcase to burn a hole through his head. The fact that no such laser weapons exist did stop them from claiming it was true (and even if there was a real weapon, real KGB agents would presumably not be so stupid and poorly trained as to accidentally assassinate someone who was just blowing smoke).

[Mickey Blue]

Reminds me of "Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction" (with commander Riker!). For those who don't know the premise was interesting, they'd present a few stories some of which were true and some of which were false and you had to guess which was which (they'd tell you at the end).

Unfortunately they used the word "true" rather loosely, nearest I can figure "True" means that they heard it somewhere, as opposed to deliberately making it up themselves. They had plenty of overt, even popular, urban legends on the show labeled as true as well as 'real' fake pictures (they'd do those between commercial breaks, show you a bunch of pictures and you'd pick which were 'real').

[mags]

It was similar to the thread on here, true, just completely different.

I only watched it a few times, but one stands out to me. It was dramatized as happening in the modern day. A woman and her mother check into a hotel, then the mother falls ill. Then she basically disappears when the daughter leaves to get medicine or whatever, and everyone at the hotel claims to have no knowledge of having ever seen either of them before. It was "true" except it happened during a typhoid or similar epidemic around the turn of the last century. She had died, but the hotel owners were afraid of lost business if it got out that an ill woman had died in the hotel.

[crocoduck_hunter]

Originally Posted by Mickey Blue

Reminds me of "Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction" (with commander Riker!). For those who don't know the premise was interesting, they'd present a few stories some of which were true and some of which were false and you had to guess which was which (they'd tell you at the end).

Unfortunately they used the word "true" rather loosely, nearest I can figure "True" means that they heard it somewhere, as opposed to deliberately making it up themselves.

Far too many of those types of shows did that, unfortunately. I vaguely remember that show, though I can't actually recall anything they covered.

[Mickey Blue]

One base flaw with the show really is that there are some stories that cannot possibly be verified even if somebody wanted to. For example on (I just watched, nostalgia..) is about a woman who had a candle stolen from her and years later happened to have it 'save her life' (long story) and it ended with her accidentally breaking it and finding her grandmother's lost diamond necklace in it. This was labeled as 'true' ("a similar story happened to a woman from the East in the eighties").

Now sure somebody may have said this but since all the events happened to one specific person who is the only one who can verify it how can it be called true even if it wasn't so far fetched?

Basically by this show's logic if I say for a while in the nineties I developed the power of flight they can show a dramatization (and change a few things to make it even more interesting) and then say it's based on a true story.

[crocoduck_hunter]

Yeah, shows that do that annoy the hell out of me.

[Mickey Blue]

Strangely enough I do sorta like the show.. It's got the nostalgia factor and it's just so charmingly corny (everything from Franks' odd segues and the over the top 'acting' in the dramatizations).

ETA:

Decided to watch 1000 ways to die after reading it here.. This show is totally up my alley. Just had a vignette about a guy who died in an industrial clothes dryer and ended it with "Every year X people get into a dryer set to tumble DIE!".

Also I do like how they dance around the truth by having over the top dramatizations, like (and this may well be real but just using it as a possible example) a guy who collected dangerous animals and died when an escaped black widow bit him, in his delirium he released all his dangerous creatures which fed on his body after he died for weeks.. Then they say "Every year two people die from black widow bites" and it's like "Ok, fair enough, but that's not exactly the same thing as from the little clip."

ETA2:

And another about a guy who gets a job at a mob meat market who was stealing meat and slept with the bosses underage daughter and was locked in the meat freezer to die.. But the cite is about 'deaths from freezing', again, not really the same thing.

That said, I do find it pretty entertaining ("Freeze Died!"), also how common are meat lockers that can only be opened from the outside? You see them all the time in the media but it seems like a pretty obvious design flaw.

[Morrigan]

Wow...necro thread FTW!

It's weird seeing a post of mine that I kinda remember posting 2 years ago!

[GenYus234]

Originally Posted by Mickey Blue

That said, I do find it pretty entertaining ("Freeze Died!"), also how common are meat lockers that can only be opened from the outside? You see them all the time in the media but it seems like a pretty obvious design flaw.

Shouldn't be very common, at least in the US. OSHA regulations (29 CFR 1910.37) require crash/panic bars on walk-in freezers*. If a store or restaurant was built before such regulations went into place, it might not have them, but I believe those laws are pretty old.

*It is actually a fire exit situation in that the exit path from a building may not have any doors that could be locked and unusable from the inside.

[Alarm]

Originally Posted by Mickey Blue

ETA2:

And another about a guy who gets a job at a mob meat market who was stealing meat and slept with the bosses underage daughter and was locked in the meat freezer to die.. But the cite is about 'deaths from freezing', again, not really the same thing.

That said, I do find it pretty entertaining ("Freeze Died!"), also how common are meat lockers that can only be opened from the outside? You see them all the time in the media but it seems like a pretty obvious design flaw.

When I used to work in a grocery store, the coolers had a handle on the outside, a push button on the inside. If you had a nail or bit of metal, there was a hole in the handle that was usually for putting a padlock, which you could use to lock someone in the cooler. This was a bit over ten years ago. I'm not sure but I think the freezers had the same doors.

[GenYus234]

Did locking the cooler door that way lock it from the inside or just the outside? It could have been like fire exit doors where they are only lockable from one side

[Mickey Blue]

Well I can sorta see some means of deliberately locking somebody in (which in fairness was what happened in the scene) but it made me think of the many examples of "The door closed behind me" examples which just seem like a blatantly obvious design flaw as it would require you to deliberately build the door so it couldn't be opened from the inside.